Buccaneer

Buccaneers were privateers and pirates particular to the Caribbean Sea from the 17th to 18th centuries. The term buccaneer comes from the French food viande boucanee, "jerked meat", which was sold to French privateers as they conducted raids on Spanish shipping in the Caribbean. The French were the first to grant letters of marque to buccaneers licenses to attack Spanish shipping, and England and the United Provinces would later adopt the practice. Privateers were largely lawless, but they were nominally soldiers of their employers; buccaneers such as Christopher Myngs and Henry Morgan became admirals in the English Navy after preying on Spanish settlements and shipping in the Caribbean. In the 1690s, the practice began to die out as the "no peace beyond the Line (the New World-Old World border)" policy was abandoned, and the buccaneers would later be forcefully suppressed and replaced by wartime privateers or peacetime pirates.